In 1646 BC a massive volcanic eruption, perhaps one of the
largest ever witnessed by mankind, took place at Thera (present day
Santorini), an island in the Aegean not far from Crete. The
explosion, estimated to be about the equivalent of 40 atomic bombs
or approximately 100 times more powerful than the eruption at
Pompeii, blew out the interior of the island and forever altered
its topography. Possibly as many as 20,000 people were killed as a
result of the volcanic explosion. Just as happened at Pompeii
centuries later, a settlement on Thera known as the town of
Akrotiri was buried under a thick blanket of ash and pumice.

For more than 3,500 years the ancient Bronze Age community lay
hidden- one of Greece's many secrets of the past. Then, as is often
the case with various heritage sites, the town of Akrotiri was
accidentally discovered. Quarry workers, digging out the pumice for
use in the manufacture of cement for the Suez Canal, chanced upon
some stone walls in the middle of their quarry. These eventually
proved to be remains of the long-forgotten town. Archaeologists
from France and later from Germany did some preliminary excavation
in the second half of the 19th Century but it was not
until 1967 that systematic excavation began at the site in earnest.
Spyridon Marinatos, supported by the Archaeological Society of
Athens, soon began to uncover the remains of the ancient town. It
was not easy. Not only were the buried buildings two or even three
stories tall, the original building materials (clay and wood) had
been damaged by earthquakes, fire and the hands of time. It was
necessary to proceed slowly and carefully. Work on the project has
now been on-going for almost four decades and it is likely to
continue into the foreseeable future.

The site has yielded some surprising information. Most startling
of all is the fact that no human remains have been found at
Akrotiri, unlike Pompeii and Herculaneum where the dead were buried
in the midst of their daily activities. At Akrotiri, it was obvious
that people had begun to do some repair work to their dwellings,
probably in response to minor earthquake or volcanic damage.
However, before the major eruption at least some of them had the
time to pack up their families and most valuable possessions and
leave. Huge pottery containers and large household furnishings were
abandoned in their haste to depart but it seems clear that most
people got away safely, were buried elsewhere or were swept away by
the tsunami waves that might have accompanied such a massive
eruption.

The Akrotiri site has not yielded huge amounts of gold, silver
and bronze artifacts, nothing on the scale that might have been
expected had the inhabitants been caught unawares. But a splendid
visual legacy was left, most of it in pieces that are painstakingly
being assembled by Christos Doumas and his colleagues. The frescoes
at Akrotiri are spectacular, were exceptionally well-preserved by
the protective blanket of ash that covered them and their locations
can be correlated to various rooms within the town.

The paintings provide a lot of visual information that needs to
be carefully analyzed- a fleet of ships manned by sailors allowing
one to see how the vessels were rigged, how the crew was dressed,
what they carried by way of tools and weapons; people in the
community going about their daily activities, picking flowers,
making religious offerings; two nude fishermen carrying strings of
fish; young boys in a boxing match, etc.

Historians have been debating for years about exactly when the
major eruption at Thera took place. Radio-carbon dating and
dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) had narrowed the date down to a
range of years but neither could confirm a specific year. Then
improvements in the science of ice core dating made it possible to
pinpoint a particular year-1646 BC- a century earlier than most
historians had thought. (Ice cores drilled out of the Greenland ice
cap show seasonal variation in the same manner as tree rings. The
winter snow fall creates yearly bands and within that band the
atmospheric activity is recorded. The volcanic eruption at Thera
was confirmed as happening in 1646. At the present time, the core
depth allows scholars to look back in time some 200,000 years and
work will continue on making that timeline longer.)